Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Given that my interest in EVE has been waning due mostly to the slow pace and lack of excitement in the combat mechanics, it comes as a very welcome surprise that Aventurine has released a Seven Day Trial of Darkfall for $1.

You might recall that I was on the verge of trying Darkfall a month ago when I opted to try EVE instead because of the 14-day free Trial. This isn’t a case of me being some cheapskate unwilling to fork out cash. I bought my EVE account the following day well in advance of the Trial ending.

No. I find that Trials are important to me because 100% of my gaming takes place on a laptop. Unfortunately, laptops and their lousy drivers don’t always follow the same system requirement rules as everyone else. There is very little that is more frustrating to me than buying a shiny new game only to find that it plays like crap. Not a problem I’ve had with my latest laptop, but my old laptop definitely had some occasional issues.

Top Interests about Darkfall

First Person Combat

Negative sum PvP

Territory control

While the rest of you were playing EQ and UO, I was playing First Person Shooters like Starsiege:Tribes, Quake, Half-Life, Unreal, Counterstrike, and Rainbow Six. So it shouldn’t be a big surprise that a game with First Person combat mechanics would be appealing to me. In some ways, I always played MMOs like a FPS.

Top Concerns about Darkfall

Big, empty world

Grinding without purpose

Lengthy material requirements for “Things”

Exploits, cheats and hacks

I’ll like the game and need to learn how to spell Aventurine without looking it up

By all accounts, the world is big and a world without people or creatures is no world at all. I’ve never been a fan of lengthy travel and in some of the stories I’ve read by Syncaine and others, there is always this unspoken subtext that it takes a really long time to get from Point A to Point B. Also, many of the videos I have seen have shown some largely empty areas devoid of life.

I’m also a little concerned about wandering around the world looking for random monsters to kill for lewtz. At least for me personally, I’m going to need to research some purpose for killing specific mobs. It will quickly drive me nuts if I don’t have good reasons beyond ‘skilling’ points for attacking stuff.

On a related note, I’ve also never been a big fan of needing to kill 10,000 bears for the fur needed to build a fur hat. It’s one thing if it’s something big enough to be a group or collective effort (like a naval ship or Titan) but entirely another thing if it’s some minor stat upgrade. It’s not the mechanic of needing fur for hats, but the effort not equaling the reward that has me concerned. I don’t want to spend four weeks as a naked gatherer before I can travel to the next town.